Memories of La Jolla | shadeTreeImaging

There are two locations in San Diego County that produce in me thoughts of the three generations of Daynes that preceded me. The first is Scripps Ranch and Miramar Lake, where my great-grandfather, James Daynes (born 1822), homesteaded circa 1840. The other is La Jolla, where my great-grandfather moved the family after turning over the ranch (now under the waters of Miramar Lake) to his neighbor, E. W. Scripps.

My grandfather, C. M. Daynes, (born 1889) was a teen when the family landed in La Jolla. In the early 1900s, La Jolla was a humble village with cobblestone streets. My dad and his three older sisters were born here. During the depression, my grandfather worked with the WPA, doing construction. But most of the old-timers in La Jolla remember him as the swimming teacher who taught many folks in town how to swim the ‘right way’.

Near the end of WWII, when Hollywood was making extravagant swimming movies, my grandfather was recruited from his La Jolla hometown to be the ‘water choreographer’ for the film “Bathing Beauty” a 1944 musical film, starring Red Skelton, Basil Rathbone, and Esther Williams, and directed by George Sidney.

Given its proximity to ‘civilization’, it is surprising how much sea life can be found along the rocky shores in La Jolla. It had been several years since I last visited the La Jolla Cove area, but last week I was giving my young friend Lan a tour of local birding locations, and this place seemed a good place to explore. New to me on this day was seeing the barriers preventing two-legged explorers from wandering out to the shoreline, and how this simple precaution allowed California Sea Lions to breed and raise their babies here. I’d like to think that by returning these shores to a more ‘wild’ state, they are now more like they were when my grandfather and my father were young.

I’ve long enjoyed photographing seabirds here. Cormorants, gulls, terns, and shorebirds seem to thrive here, gleaning the crustaceans, mollusks, and other tiny life-forms that cling to the rocky, wave-washed rocks and patches of sand.